My Experience As a Digital Marketing Intern at Path Interactive

My fun and experience-loaded summer internship all started by going up the elevator to the 19th floor and asking for “Path Interactive” in Nashville. The 14-week Digital Marketing Internship at Path Interactive is much more than your average resúmé builder. It enables you to strengthen your marketing skills and become more confident working at a digital marketing agency. There are offices in both New York City and Nashville, but I had the unique pleasure of being Nashville’s first-ever intern.

From weekly 2-hour training sessions on the latest digital marketing topics to sitting in on team meetings, this internship is everything you need to kickstart your marketing career. Instead of fetching coffee, you will have the opportunity to work on crucial tasks for real clients. This real-life experience is what enables me to say confidently that Path Interactive has an amazing Digital Marketing Internship Program.

At the start of my internship I was asked to choose the area to focus on. Social media has always been an interest and allows me to pour out my creativity. However, I was also opened to learning more technical skills and opted for a combination of both social and SEO focuses.

What I Learned About SEO

I had a basic knowledge of what SEO was before I started this internship, but that quickly changed. I was given a series of tasks for large client websites from creating title tags and meta descriptions to optimizing images. I was sitting in on SEO training and being given important tasks about the best SEO practices. This created the perfect opportunity for me to apply what I learned and see it come to life. For example, I was given a project where I had to create title tags and meta descriptions for a large retailer and got to see the impact of my work come to fruition. Such work had involved keyword research and other steps which further grew my skill set.

Another good bit of SEO fun I got to take part in was working with local SEO. I gained great exposure to working in Yext, an online data management tool that is designed to keep track of your business’ location-related information on multiple directories. I also worked with Google My Business Categories and learned the ins-and-outs of these robust local SEO practices, and even got to update Path Interactive’s Google My Business Categories and track the changes that resulted from the new category implementation.

SEO is always being updated, and through this internship, I got to learn about new trends and how to stay up-to-date with the latest SEO news and techniques. Even our SEO team meetings had focused discussions on how to improve our SEO efforts in all areas.

The best part of it all? As interns, we had a say. In this internship, you will feel like a team member rather than an intern. I also got the opportunity to do a few presentations which sparked great, relevant conversation on SEO practices.

My Experience in Social Media Marketing and Influencer Marketing

After the complimentary coffee and breakfast each morning, I dove into my responsibilities in social media. After a bit of learning, I was put in charge of managing the communities on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for several brands — which meant I was responsible for replies, inquiries, etc. Many things that go into managing a brand’s social as each brand has its voice and identity that needs to remain consistent across all platforms.

To add to my development, I would research the latest marketing trends across all social media platforms. These platforms are fluid and every good marketer needs to keep up with the latest changes in algorithms, designs, and trends. Learning was a huge focal point in this internship. There was the perfect balance of learning and hands-on experience.

Perhaps the most engaging part of social media marketing was Influencer Marketing. From finding the right influencers based on engagement and target audience to creating contracts/briefs and negotiating with PR agents, I gained valuable experience and learned how to properly execute influencer marketing.

When it comes to influencer marketing, developing a plan is very important. By figuring out your target audience, you can then leverage the influencers and their built-in audiences. Be sure to pay attention to more than just followers — a high number of followers and likes numbers may seem great at first, they might lack the engagement your brand is seeking. It is crucial to check out the influencer’s engagement in the comments section, including relative comments which seek interest in the influencer or past brand partnerships.

The Impact of Path Interactive’s Digital Marketing Internship

There shear amount of information afforded to my intern class was way more than just SEO and social media. From using blog posts to your advantage, working with backlinks, developing Facebook campaigns, digging for answers in Google Analytics, this internship will give you everything you are looking for. My experience was just in Social and SEO, but the other teams still gave me exposure to their world. Path Interactive is like a family — and everyone is willing to help you grow and sharpen your marketing skills in addition to being great coworkers. I am walking away from this internship with a whole new perspective on digital marketing and a wonderful exposure to agency life.

Path Interactive is a performance-driven digital marketing agency with offices in New York City and Nashville. Our team provides deep expertise in a full suite of results-oriented marketing services including PPC management, SEO, social media and display/digital media advertising.